Sunday, April 10, 2016

What is Chometz?

When I learned about Pesach as a kid, I was taught that when
flour and water are mixed together the mixture begins to rise after eighteen
minutes, and this makes it chometz. The implication was that this was a physical
change. Before eighteen minutes the dough had not yet begun to rise, and so it
was still kosher l'Pesach. After eighteen minutes, it was chometz.

The problem here is that this isn't the way the world works.
Yeast is a naturally-occurring parasite that lives on grains and other produce.
When it is wet it metabolizes starches and sugar to make more of itself, giving
off gasses in the process. It is these gasses that make bread rise. Eighteen is a magic number in Judaism, but yeast doesn't know that. Fermentation
begins as soon as the water and flour are mixed together, not eighteen minutes
later.

The problem can be solved by reclassifying chometz as a
legal rather than a descriptive definition. Dough becomes chometz after
eighteen minutes because that's the rule rather than because of some physical
change. This sidesteps the empirical problem, but leaves two others.

The first is that this wasn't the original understanding.
When the halacha was first formulated, people didn't know about microorganisms
like yeast or how their lifecycles affect our baking. They just knew that if
you mixed flour and water and left it alone long enough in a warm place, it
would rise, and that by adding a bit of already-risen dough to a new batch, you
could make it rise faster. Why this happened was a mystery. It wasn't until the
invention of the microscope in the 1600s that it was discovered that there were
tiny things on grain, and it wasn't until the mid-1800s that it was understood
that these things were alive and were what made bread rise.

Given their lack of modern knowledge, it was reasonable for
the formulators of the halachos of chometz to assume that it took some time for
whatever it was that made bread rise to start working. If you watch a batch of
dough, it certainly seems that it takes a while before anything happens. The
importance of eighteen led them to use that number, and for millennia it was
thought that dough doesn't begin to rise until eighteen minutes after the water
and flour are mixed together. It is only in the last hundred and fifty years,
when we learned how it really works, that it became necessary to reclassify
chometz as a legal rather than a physical definition.

The second problem is that it makes the definition of chometz arbitrary. There is no discernible difference between a batch of
dough that has been sitting for seventeen minutes and one that has been sitting
for nineteen minutes. Instead of something real, chometz becomes a rule in a
game we're playing called "Judaism." It's no longer that chometz is a
different kind of thing than non-chometz, and we avoid that thing during Pesach
because the nature of the holiday is such that chometz affects us differently
than it does the rest of the year. Instead, chometz and non-chometz are separated
only by the rules of the game. They are
the same thing, but the rules say that after eighteen minutes we call dough
"chometz" and treat it as if
it were different than non-chometz.

Some try to save the sense of chometz and non-chometz really
being different types of things by shunting the difference off into the metaphysical
world. Although here, in the physical world, we don't see a difference, in the
olam haemes there is a profound spiritual difference between them. Putting
aside the oddity of people who decry the corrosive effects of "Greek
wisdom" embracing a Platonic conception of the cosmos, this is obviously a
post-hoc attempt to save the reality of the distinction between chometz and
non-chometz. Right up until we knew differently, it was assumed that there was
a real physical difference. As soon as we found out how fermentation really
works, the difference was shunted off into an inaccessible metaphysical world
where it is safe from empirical investigation.

One of the first major figures to change the underpinnings
of halachos from physical to metaphysical was the Maharal, who lived through
the beginning of the Scientific Revolution in the mid-1500s. That this trend emerged
just as we began to discover how the world really works should make it obvious
that it was not so much a revelation about the true nature of halacha as it was
an attempt to keep halacha from becoming irrelevant as it's real-world
justifications were cut out from under it.

For most of its history, the halachos of chometz were
thought to rest on a real difference between chometz and non-chometz. They were
different kinds of stuff, and so it made sense to treat them differently. As
soon as it was discovered that's not so, chometz became just a rule in the
Judaism game, weakly bolstered by the unknowable assertion that metaphysically,
they really are different. This is the danger that science poses to religion. Rules
that were once simply a reflection of reality become arbitrary, and those who
want them to be more than that are left to petulantly insist that their game is
real after all, in an inaccessible higher
reality that small-minded materialists refuse to acknowledge just because there
is no reason to posit its existence other than to keep religious rules from
becoming arbitrary.

7 comments:

Some try to save the sense of chometz and non-chometz really being different types of things by shunting the difference off into the metaphysical world. Although here, in the physical world, we don't see a difference, in the olam haemes there is a profound spiritual difference between them.

And here I thought that transsubstantiation was just a Catholic thing.

I didn't know you had your own blog. This is the first post I've read and it's great. Kol hakavod! I'll be reading thru prior ones as time allows. I'm also Rational Thinker from Harry's blog but there's no Disqus sign in here so I'm using ah-pee-chorus.

I second your assessment of this post and think it's really an excellent analysis of the topic.

On another Passover-related matter, I find it quite surprising that there's still been no reaction that I'm aware of by skeptical bloggers to Prof. Joshua Berman's essay defending the historicity of the Exodus.

I skimmed through the article. It's an interesting read, though a bit long for online reading.

The beginning of the article implies that he's setting out to save the historicity of the Exodus story. Yet if you add the word "traditional," he's in agreement with the statement he quotes from R' Wolbe that the [traditional ] Exodus story didn't happen. Did small a group of Semitic slaves escape from Egypt and migrate to Canaan? Very possibly, especially given his arguments. But so what? If it was a few hundred families, then the great nation is not so great, and the shevatim, rather than impressive entities, are instead just extended families of a couple of hundred people each. The Exodus story is impressive because the Israelite nation was liberated with "signs and wonders" and given the Torah at Har Sinai.

He's advocating treating Biblical accounts as we do other ancient mythology that gives historical details. Fair enough, but then we have to strip out the mythical elements, as he says scholars do with all mythology. We can treat the biblical story as a piece of evidence that there was probably a group who left Egypt. We can't treat it as evidence for the maakos or divine revelation.

What's interesting is that he looks at the Biblical account as if everything is true except the Exodus, and then uses those other elements to show how the Exodus could have happened. But some of those things, like a centralized place of worship in the midbar, which he cites to show that the camp couldn't have been big enough for millions of people, may have been a retrojection by people during the Temple era of their own form of worship back into the myths about their ancestors.

Your summary is actually a very close reflection of my own reaction after first reading the article.

At any rate, since his parting assurance that we can utter the words “We were slaves to a pharaoh in Egypt" with 'confidence and integrity' does not -- based on everything else he says -- extend to the more magical elements in the Haggadah ( splitting of the sea, manna falling out of the sky, etc.), I guess I'll just have to wait for confirmation of these claims from another source.

But something tells me that you wouldn't advise me to hold my breath...

About Me

I grew up in New York in what would now be called a liberal Yeshivish family. I went to a Yeshivish elementary school, a right-wing Yeshivish high-school, and spent several years in Beis Medrash.
I currently live in an Orthodox Jewish community in a mid-sized city with my wonderful wife (who is fully aware of my opinions) and our kids. I have a masters in psychology, consider myself a history buff (particularly of military history), and have an active interest in philosophy, theology, and social psychology. I’ve always been a skeptic, but usually the only one – the only one in my Orthodox Jewish high school, the only one in the post-high school yeshiva I went to, the only one in my family. Then a few years ago I stumbled across the Jewish skeptics’ blogosphere, and I was amazed to find people just like me. A little over a year later I started my own blog, http://2nd-son.blogspot.com/ where I write about my experiences, philosophy, and theology, get my thoughts in order, and generally try to convince myself that I’m an intellectual.